Various Artists

21st Century, 21st Year

David Byrne's label celebrates 21 years in business with a comp that includes Tom Zé, Os Mutantes, Shuggie Otis, Zap Mama, and the proprietor himself.

Our love affair with nice, neat, round numbers has less to do with their symbolic value and more to do with their tidy divisibility. But from blackjack to getting blitzed, the number 21 proves the rare exception. Even so, one wonders if Luaka Bop: 21st Century, 21st Year, a comp celebrating the awkward 21st anniversary of the Luaka Bop label, was as much a victim of circumstance as design. Luaka Bop spent much of 2007 in limbo, searching for a new distributor after V2 went under. Even once they were back up and running, LB releases were relatively few and far between. It took a while to wend through the backlog of unreleased records (Jim White, Kassin, et al.), and now that Luaka Bop seems to be back on track-- well, 21st anniversary it is.

Anniversary or no, in many ways every Luaka Bop release has been a celebration of sorts, of some great acts rescued from semi-obscurity (Shuggie Otis or Tom Zé), music rendered to the margins of the mainstream (its various Brazilian or World Psychedelic Classics comps), or global pop stars in search of a Western audience (like Zap Mama or Susana Baca). Putting its name and reputation behind these releases made Luaka Bop as important as any imprint in negating the need for the word "world" in "world music" and underscoring the qualities that all great artists share rather than their differences.

Yet it's hard to know just what we're actually meant to take away from the meager 15 tracks included in the set. They are a mere tease of the breadth and diversity of Luaka Bop's catalog, which over the years has given a home to acts as varied as A.R. Kane and Zé. If every Luaka Bop release is a celebration, this one feels a little more like a sampler, drawing from the label's dozens of releases for the most cursory and, by necessity, far from comprehensive of overviews.

The inscrutable Tom Zé is here, of course, as well as Jorge Ben, Marcio Local, Os Mutantes ("Baby", natch) and Moreno + 2 (Caetano Veloso's son), amply representing quirky Brazilian pop from the past to the present. From West Africa, we get a funky track from Mali's Moussa Doumbia. We get a handful of unclassifiable songs from journeymen acts such as Shuggie Otis (the psych-folk-funk of "Aht Uh Mi Hed"), Zap Mama, Jim White, Geggy Tah, and label founder David Byrne himself (his "Fuzzy Freaky", a rootless trip-hop excursion from the Feelings album). Cuba's Irakere, Peru's Susana Baca, and Venezuela's Los Amigos Invisibles provide a snapshot of Latin-American pop, while France's Nouvelle Vague represents provides breezy boho kitsch with its re-imagined de-discoed cover of Blondie's "Heart of Glass".

That song aside, just about every track on here is ace. But so are the albums and comps-- many trailblazers at the time-- from which they are taken. If you're late to the game (like, 21 years late) then Luaka Bop: 21st Century, 21st Year could be a starting point. For the rest of us, the disc underscores both how far we've come as music consumers (the deep waters of Tropicália or West African funk are much more familiar) but also how far the West still lags behind. Conspicuously, the closest Luaka Bop has come to shepherding a hit-- Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha"-- isn't to be found on the disc, nor is the band itself. It's as if, so many years down the line, the label still feels compelled to place the emphasis on the less familiar, in the dogged hope that one day everyone will finally recognize the hidden-in-plain-sight riches around us and start filling their pockets.